Your Right to Know

CLEVELAND — Mayor Frank Jackson is seeking re-election on a platform boasting of city
improvements, and he faces a wealthy businessman who is highlighting crime and job concerns and a
troubled police department.

Jackson, 67, seeking a third four-year term, and Ken Lanci, 63, a printing-house mogul, will
face each other in Tuesday’s nonpartisan election to head one of the nation’s poorest cities. Both
are Democrats. No independent polls have emerged.

Jackson, first elected to the city council in heavily Democratic Cleveland in 1989, should
benefit from strong name recognition and ties to the party’s rank and file. Still, he has met a
vigorous and sometimes-quirky challenge from Lanci, who has pumped more than $400,000 into his
campaign.

Lanci won 12 percent of the vote in a four-way 2010 campaign for the new Cuyahoga County
executive job when the county dumped its corruption-tainted commission government. Democrat Ed
FitzGerald, now a candidate for governor, won that race.

Jackson was the low-key city council president when he ousted Democratic Mayor Jane Campbell in
2005 with 55 percent of the vote. He won re-election in 2009 with 77 percent.

The poverty rate — about 1 in 3 people — is unchanged from 2005, while the population has
dropped 16 percent to about 390,000. Employment in the city has declined from 175,400 to 149,200
since 2005.

At the same time, downtown residential units are surging, there’s a new convention center and
medical-technology exhibit hall, and reviving neighborhoods such as Tremont and Ohio City are
getting a lot of buzz.

Jackson has crafted his campaign on the theme of having created a “pathway” for growth based on
stable city services and taxes, bringing back hard-pressed neighborhoods, and guiding downtown
development.

“Over the past eight years as your mayor, I’ve positioned Cleveland, along with the help of many
of you here, to be successful in that effort,” he said in a City Club of Cleveland debate before a
business-heavy audience.

Jackson said his stewardship helped the city come through the recession on a positive note. He
struck an alliance with GOP Gov. John Kasich and Republican state legislators to overhaul the
mayor-controlled city schools, providing flexibility on teacher hiring and assignments and charter
schools.

The district, which has a high dropout rate and declining enrollment, was still interviewing
teacher applicants days before the election. And Jackson has been nagged by a community uproar over
a 2012 police chase that involved more than 100 officers and ended in the shooting deaths of two
apparently unarmed people.

The two people killed were black, and the 13 officers who fired their guns are white or
Hispanic; some people alleged it was a racially motivated shooting. County and federal prosecutors
are investigating.

Jackson, who is black, has defended the white police chief, providing a political opening for
Lanci. Lanci landed the police union’s endorsement, promised to fire the chief if elected, and made
anti-crime vigils a staple of his campaign.

“We will improve schools, we will improve safety, and I will definitely create jobs, as I have
always done in my entire life,” he told the Associated Press.

Lanci also hits on a recurring political sore point: the suggestion that city hall favors
downtown business interests over its working-class, ethnic neighborhoods.

“If you are a businessperson or a person of means that lives in the county (suburbs), you want
Frank Jackson,” Lanci said. “If you are a resident that lives in the city, you are suffering at the
hands of Frank Jackson.”

Lanci, whose white hair and year-round tan are a smiling presence in campaign advertising on
buses, has spiced his campaign with cash-mob scenes to patronize small businesses and an appearance
in a stunt that claimed a world record for the most people set ablaze in fire-resistant
outfits.